No wonder he’s never won anything in European football. (The one notable exception here, of course, is Marcelo Bielsa, whose Leeds United line-ups this season have included as many as seven left-footed players at a time. A left-footed penalty taker?! I can’t watch. The left hemisphere controls movement for the right side of the body, while the right hemisphere directs the left side. An entirely left-footed strike force? They’ll be running into each other. The human brain includes two hemispheres connected by a bundle of nerves. Two left-footed central midfielders? An attacking cul-de-sac waiting to happen. Two left-footed centre-backs? At least one too many. Even allowing for the natural dearth of left-sided players, there is a subtle but disproportionate mistrust. Put simply: left-footed players are more exotic, more specialist, more scarce - and more expensive when you do find them. The results of these experiments also revealed that the two sides of the brain performed. Significantly, though, the research also identified “a raw (salary) premium of 14.8 per cent for left-footedness relative to being right-footed”. Sperry discovered that by cutting the corpus callosum, a large bundle of fibers that connects the right and left hemispheres of the brain, he could reduce seizures in patients with epilepsy. In 2009, crack research institute the Centre for Economic Performance published a 22-page discussion paper, in which its research revealed 22 per cent of top-flight footballers across the top five European leagues were left-footed, with 60 per cent favouring their right side. It’s not all bad news for the portside-favouring aces, though. After all, no right foot has ever been called “a wand”. Did you know that the word “sinister” comes from the Latin for “left”? And so, for the subsequent 700 years, jinking left-wingers, thunderous left-backs and unapologetically one-footed finishers have been subject to our subconscious curiosity, bias and fetishisation. This article is part of The Athletic’s Premier League: X vs Y series.

Left sided brain vs right sided brain